


Ghost Ships

by Silex



Category: The Nasty at Bellua
Genre: Blood and Gore, Character Death, Gen, Horror, Outer Space, Post-Canon, Trick or Treat: Trick, Were-Creatures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 19:35:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21202940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: TheSilver Starwasn’t equipped for a rescue mission, it was barely equipped for a salvage mission, but you’d have to be a bastard to ignore a distress signal, even if there was probably nothing you could do.





	Ghost Ships

**Author's Note:**

  * For [escritoireazul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/escritoireazul/gifts).

The _Silver Star_ wasn’t equipped for a rescue mission, it was barely equipped for a salvage mission, but you’d have to be a bastard to ignore a distress signal, even if there was probably nothing you could do.

After all, the _Silver Star_ was little more than a yacht, out on what amounted to an adventure cruise on the safe edge of explored space.

The ship’s owners, all three of them, thought that it was a grand adventure and the captain and crew thought it was a job that paid well enough that hauling a trio of rich dilettantes around wasn’t that bad.

It was an automated distress signal, which, when they picked up the broadcast of the ship’s information made sense. The _Bellua_ was massive, the kind of place a person could get lost in, or an automated alarm could kick off and start broadcasting before the crew could shut it down.

Melony, who’d been the one manning the radio when they picked up the signal, had been on a mining station where that had happened once.

This was different though, when she’d first hailed them, to see what the problem was, there was no response.

At that point she reported to the captain, and they’d known that they had no choice.

She’d continued trying to raise someone over the radio or get more information.

It was a general distress beacon, meaning it told nothing about the nature of the emergency or the state of the ship. Scans and visuals were all they had to go by.

The ship was still under power, holding a steady course towards nothing, and didn’t seem to be hemorrhaging oxygen, which were usually good signs.

Usually.

If there’d been a problem with the life-support systems there was no telling what the might be getting into if they boarded it

And it was a research vessel, sending people dirtside into who knew what, so it might not necessarily have been a simple systems failure.

Melony had said as much, and her concerns had been dismissed as the result of an overactive imagination, spending too much time listening to audio dramas in between her duties as navigator and engineer.

The temptation to go over the captain’s head by talking to the ship’s owners was strong. Two of them were minor holovision stars so it was easy to plant the craziest ideas in their heads.

Unfortunately, the idea that they’d taken a hold of was one of a daring rescue.

Melony had listened to their big reassuring speech, made across dead air, the kind of thing that they’d probably always wanted to give in real life, wanting to scream that what they were doing was meaningless.

She’d held her tongue and continued trying to contact someone on the _Bellua_, knowing that she was being an idiot as much as the ships’ owner was.

Except there were moments when the radio indicated that a signal was coming through, some contact from the ship beyond the automated beacon.

So she sat there while the others, including one of the ship’s owners, got a lifeboat ready to send to the _Bellua_.

All of the research vessel’s launch ports were closed and sealed.

They’d never launched anything.

Which meant that they were still there, in whatever state they were in.

Another crackle of something from the radio, a hiss that wasn’t static and a sound.

It had to be an artifact of transmission, or something malfunctioning, because a person didn’t make noises like that.

She’d be hard pressed to think that even an equipment failure could make a sound like that, but the sound had been there.

Melony had called the captain in, right as their little rescue effort launched, and he shut down the radio, told her to find something else to do with her time.

She’d considered saying something, but thought better of it.

Maybe she was imagining things.

Maybe she was reading too much into the silence that she’d been listening to.

She watched on screen as the lifeboat, fully equipped with the latest in medical technology, anything they’d need if there were survivors, docked.

Melony didn’t think there’d be any survivors.

She wasn’t sure why, but there was something about the massive research vessel that made her feel that way, like it was some sort of great leviathan out of ancient myth that had swallowed everything inside it, chewed it up with teeth deep in its throat and held onto the pieces.

It wasn’t going to let go.

The docking was successful, contact with the _Bellua_ had been made.

Contact in that the lifeboat’s systems had determined that there was air in the ship was breathable, free of known contaminants and pathogens, but off in some way that the scan wasn’t sensitive enough to tell them any more detail on. The ratio of gasses, some trace elements of something.

The boarding party entered and began broadcasting video feed back to the _Silver Star_.

Melony, along with the rest of the crew that stayed behind, watched in silence.

None of the boarding party took off their protective gear, just in case the _Bellua_ had picked up something that the scan hadn’t detected. They never discussed it, simply went along in tacit agreement. It was always a danger with going dirtside on unexplored planets, that some microorganism, harmless on its own world, would wreak havoc on the human immune system or a ship itself. It meant that one EVA suited figure was the same as the next, only the murmur of apprehensive voices differentiating any of them.

When the boarding party came back, whether they found anything or not, they’d go through decontamination. Whole ships had been gutted and sterilized over unkillable, but otherwise harmless fungal infestations.

The search of the ship began with a whole lot of nothing.

Or not exactly nothing, the robotic crew was busy repairing damage to the inside of the ship.

Inexplicable damage.

Sections of the wall plating peeled back or lined with deep gouges that nothing could have made.

You didn’t see damage like that on the inside of a spaceship.

Or the outside.

They were too loud, suddenly too confident in their approach, calling out and waiting for a response that didn’t come as though seeing the damage emboldened them. Damage at least indicated that something had happened.

One member of the boarding party claimed that the air in the distance seemed to shimmer as though with intense heat. Melony couldn’t see it in the transmission and she wasn’t sure who said it, because of the commotion that followed.

There was air in the ship so sound was broadcast clearly.

Crashing, the thudding of footfalls, but all wrong, and that horrible sound from earlier.

The sound with almost-words mixed in this time.

As one the members of the boarding party turned and the half a dozen different views of the things was almost as confusing as the things themselves.

It took Melony longer than it should have to realize that there were two, in constant flux, tearing into each other, blood and silvery-black fog flowing freely from wounds as fluid as the rest of their bodies.

One tore into the other, dragging it backwards, away from the party, only for it to pull free and lunge forward, snapping and snarling, torn hindquarters dragging behind it until mangled limbs found purchase.

The claws matched the damage to the ship’s walls.

The other leapt forward, only to stumble as the one dragging itself managed to rise to its feet and clamp its jaws down into its stomach.

Half a dozen different views of the violence as they all stood frozen in shock.

One of those views turned, peeled away, bouncing and juddering as one of them ran.

The remaining views showed both creatures stop their fighting and bound forward, injuries seemingly forgotten.

Dark fog blotted out the view as the creatures, badly injured, but uncaring, shoved through the other members of the group.

Screaming rose above the howling, footage of one of the creatures latching its jaws onto someone’s arm.

The sound of bone breaking was a dry snap, hardly muffled by flesh and the EVA suit.

Again Melony wasn’t sure who, the feeds weren’t properly labeled because no one had thought to take the time to properly synchronize their EVA suits.

It wasn’t something that was ever necessary on a yacht, Melony didn’t even remember what the correct procedure was, though it had been part of her training. Knowing how to rapidly don a suit and check that it was in proper working order had seemed like the most important thing.

So she didn’t know who was running, who was being mauled and who was trying to pull the thing away.

All she could do was watch.

She and the others that had stayed behind turned to the captain for guidance, but he was as lost as the rest of them.

This was not a thing that anyone could be prepared for.

Except maybe one of the ship’s owners, who had been in a film or two that looked like what they were seeing.

Exactly like what they were seeing because this wasn’t something that happened in real life.

It didn’t feel real.

Being able to watch the view of someone running and the view of the thing behind them gaining on them in swift, bounding strides was too much to process.

The runner fell, the thing fell on them.

Everyone ran, in different directions.

The view of the carnage scattering.

Helpless screaming, meaningless questions, sobbing all vying over the broadcast because everyone was transmitting on the same channel. It wasn’t supposed to be done that way, but it was easy, made with the assumption that everyone would speak calmly, in turn.

Half of the boarding party was already dead.

Melony glanced at the clock, trying to figure out if half an hour since boarding felt like a very long time or far too short a time for so much to have happened.

One of the fallen crew member’s cameras was still broadcasting, an excellent view of matt black fur, silvery claws and teeth, tearing into a body with stomach churning violence.

Then suddenly it stopped, the view nothing more than a spreading pool of blood on the floor and smeared paw prints as the creature vanished.

It reappeared far too quickly, though it was impossible to tell which of the two creatures it was, or at least the sound of it did until the captain muted the broadcast.

No one protested even though it went against protocol. Listening, helpless as it all played out was too much, though watching wasn’t much better.

They could have gotten up and left at any time and it wouldn’t have made any difference. Nothing any of them did mattered in any way and, more importantly, there was nothing they could do.

Because a frightening possibility occurred to them seemingly all at once, a single idea that the captain gave voice to.

“We don’t know how many of those things there are on the ship.”

They’d seen two of them, but the noise of the fight could have drawn in more.

That could easily explain why yet another video feed had dissolved into spattered red and shifting black.

Without sound what they were watching became more distant, less real.

The captain turned off the video feed and Melony let out a breath that she hadn’t even realized she was holding. Around her there were other sighs and gasps, even a poorly stifled sob as the reality of what they’d watched slowly began to sink in.

No attempt would be made to rescue the survivors.

“Set timers, we’ll meet back in three hours exactly to discuss what’s happened,” the captain said firmly, leaving no room for argument or thought, which Melony was thankful for.

She didn’t want to think about what she’d seen.

“Melony, is that enough time for you to connect with the _Bellua_’s systems and scuttle the ship?”

It would be, though it took her a moment to process what the order meant. It was such an archaic term, no one scuttled a spaceship. That sort of thing just didn’t happen.

She could do it though, even if she’d never done it before, she could do it now.

Figuring out the process would be something to distract her, to distance herself further from what was playing out on the ship. For all she knew it was already over.

In three hours though, it would be over beyond all doubt, but it was best not to think that way.

The rest of the group slowly dispersed, leaving Melony alone at the computer terminal.

Space wasn’t without its mysteries and in three hours the _Bellua_ and the fates of half of the _Silver Star_’s crew and their ill-fated rescue mission would be one of them.

As Melony set to work initiating a procedure to access the _Bellua_’s life support systems, or barring that, the airlocks, she wondered how many other ships and their crews on the right or wrong side of known space, or even on well-known shipping lanes, had encountered things like this, sights and events they couldn’t explain and weren’t worth trying to.

How many crews were bound irrevocably by promises of silence?

How many derelicts and ghost ships floated out there?

Space was vast, the odds of encountering one of them were slim, but with them it had happened.

Melony looked up and shuddered, for the first time considering the enormity of the emptiness around her and how thin a protection the shell of the ship was.

Safe in the knowledge that no one else was there she turned the broadcast from the boarding crew back on.

Everything was still now. Four cameras gone, one showing the same drying blood as earlier and the last tilted at an impossible angle.

What was left of the body was visible at the bottom of the screen, mauled to the point where it wasn’t recognizable as human, just so much ruined meat.

The body didn’t matter though.

On the wall, or maybe the ceiling, it was impossible to tell from the angle, were bloody paw prints, and bloody handprints and malformed shapes somewhere in between.

_Leave_

One word and several false starts, marks where it looked like the wall had been punched hard enough to dent it and deep gouges from claws.

_Leave_

The universe wasn’t cruel, it was apathetic.

This though, this cared.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been wanting to write fanfic for this short story ever since I saw it in an exchange last year. Needless to say I was very glad to see it again this exchange.


End file.
